Acute myelogenous leukemia (AML; also known as “acute myeloid leukemia”) is an aggressive malignancy that leads to marrow failure, and death. AML affects approximately 12,000 people per year in the United States, causing 9,000 deaths1. Despite decades of research, standard therapy has not changed and the overall 5-year survival rate is 30-40%2. The current standard of care for patients with AML is induction chemotherapy with cytarabine (Ara-C) and an anthracycline2. Most patients treated this way will achieve a complete, but transient, remission. Once relapsed, the disease is increasingly resistant to further therapy. Age is an important prognostic factor in AML3. For patients 60 years of age or older the prognosis is grave. There are biological and clinical differences in older patients, resulting in a five-year survival rate of less than 10%4. These differences include increased co-morbidities resulting in higher early death rates, more patients with high-risk cytogenetic profiles and multidrug resistance phenotypes2. This is compounded by the fact that AML is a disease of the elderly with the median age-of-onset of 72 years old5. The high rate of early mortality and resistance has led some to question whether elderly patients with AML benefit from therapy at all6. There is a clear need for additional therapies with acceptable toxicity profiles.